


Dawn

by panda_shi



Series: More Than You Know [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canonical Character Death, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Guilt, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Pre-Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Spoilers, Steve Feels, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 16:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18695041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panda_shi/pseuds/panda_shi
Summary: After the battle, Steve gives voice to his grief and asks Strange his what-ifs.Warning: Avengers: Endgame spoilers.





	Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> **Avengers: Endgame spoilers ahead. If you have not seen the movie, this is your final warning. Mind the tags.**
> 
>  
> 
> Self beta'd. Will always edit/fix as I reread/revisit.

Regret comes in the form of permanent fatigue long after the wreath that carries Tony’s heart floats down the river and away from sight. It’s during these quiet pauses,when Steve is left to his own — now, here, standing on the small piece by the river, as dusk washes out from orange to purple, while the wake continues inside the Stark household — that the regret seep into the foreground of his mind, an unwelcome reminder to be re-examined once again.

What if he hadn’t left?

What if he had come back to compound?

What if they really had been together on Titan?

What if he had been present that day in New York, when Ebony Maw had come for the time stone?

What if?

(And I needed you.)

A million what-ifs.

And it would wash over Steve like long, slow waves on a shallow shore, icy cold like the emptiness that finds a permanent place somewhere under Steve’s ribcage, an eerie sort of calmness after a mad storm, because they had won. They had brought everyone back, and the Mad Titan will never again rise — not in Thanos’ timeline from whence he came, and certainly not in this one. Perhaps branches of reality in the multi-verse had changed because of that; it is victory of the greatest caliber, to spread one’s win at a war all across the multiverse.

Victory in a war, Steve knows, is always be bittersweet.

He knows this.

He’s lost men in the past and after coming out of this ice.Bittersweet is something he’s learned to accept, move on from.

But not this.

This tastes like space, so vast in its stretch, filled with a billion stars and a trillion of other life forms light years away, and yet nothing all at the same time. It’s maddening, the taste that lingers at the back of Steve’s throat, how it spreads down his throat and fills his lungs with air that he can’t exactly breathe, like space is filling him with suns and stars that burn and singe the softest of parts of him, little by little with every tick of second. It’ll keep spreading, Steve knows, in a way that he didn’t think possible. This choking on space, this vast loss that language can’t begin to describe.

It’s funny, how taking that plane down in the arctic almost a lifetime ago, as Peggy’s voice cracked into static noise hurt less than this.

The sky is dark now, stars hidden by thick clouds that would surely bring rain in the morning, and as the sound of vehicles disappear from the driveway, the wake gradually questing down, a part of Steve wonders if it would matter at all, whether Thanos had one stone or all six — if they had been together, the way they all were just a little over a week ago, they would win, wouldn’t they?

If they had been together.

(Guess what, Cap? We lost. And you weren’t there.)

The soft footfalls of leather on smooth wood makes Steve blink the thoughts away rapidly, turning his head just a little to the side as he schools his features to something a little more polite, a little quieter. His what-ifs had no place in this wake, not when a widow and now a fatherless daughter mourns. Steve is surprised to find Stephen Strange standing beside him, hands in his pockets, looking nothing like the Sorcerer Supreme and more like his old life before the accident.

Steve doesn’t realize he’s staring until Strange huffs a bit of a small, mirthless laugh. “I can tell you’re bursting at the seams wanting to ask me a question you already know the answer to.”

It comes out breathless, choked, “Was there really no other way?”

Strange looks away, ducking his head, lips pursing together as his gaze fixates at the grain of the wood under his feet, shoulders drooping with the weight of the gamble, the sacrificing choice he had to make. “Not from where we were on Titan, no,” Strange says, voice whisper soft, heavy with remorse. “Out of all fourteen million, six hundred and five, this was the only way.”

“It couldn’t —“

“Tony’s life, and a few hundreds against _billions_ on earth. _Trillions_ beyond our planet. Steve, this is the only possibility where the genocide across the universe is _stopped_. Tony understood that…”

The vast space in Steve’s chest expands further, all the way up to dark clouds gathering, past the stratosphere, before collapsing inwards. It spirals into something dark, empty, void of light and crushing like the pull of gravity. Light dies, fades, stars being swallowed as hope winks out one by one, just like that day after the battle, when the arc reactor had gone completely dark.

“What if I was there?” Steve asks, not recognizing the sound of his voice. “What if _we_ had been with him, that day on Titan? What if I had been with him? Would that have changed anything?”

Strange is looking at him all of sudden, stunned to silence, maybe, or perhaps it’s pity. Steve isn’t sure.

But what Steve is sure of is the one second of hesitance twitching along the sudden clench of Strange’s jawline, the bob of Strange’s Adam’s apple as he swallows, how he blinks once before schooling all that what-if-possibilities from his features, shuttering that bright spark that Steve knows cannot be an illusion.

“It’s not going to change our present nor our future,” Strange says, firm, resolute, a slap across Steve’s face if anything.

Strange turns to walk away, but Steve’s hands are on his wrists, desperate, clinging, because hope is a bright star in a hopelessly dark universe. Hope had flickered for a moment, however small, in the depths of the Sorcerer Supreme’s eyes. Steve didn’t need assurances, didn’t even need a solid answer. Because if there is even a 0.1 percent chance that the multiverse can change, if parts of them exists somewhere, if branches of time where Tony doesn’t die, and Natasha doesn’t die, and those hundreds others doesn’t die, where they all win can even be remotely true, Steve knows with every fiber of his being that he is going to damn well try.

One loss out of fourteen million, six hundred and five.

“Strange…”

“I don’t know.” Strange tugs his wrist free, or tries too, but Steve holds on. “Steve.”

His name iswarning on Strange’s lips, the three heartbeats after it a countdown. “Is it possible?” Steve asks again, taking a step into Strange’s space, desperate.

“ _I don’t know_ ,” Strange repeats, firmer this time. No deflection, no avoidance. He doesn’t know. But Steve clings to it, that brief second of possibility. “All I can tell you is that your actions, your choices, dictates your future. Steve, even if you went back in time, it’s not going to bring anyone back. It’s not going to change our reality. Not _here_.”

Steve hears what Strange isn’t saying, loud and clear. He releases the hold and takes a step back. The void in him explodes with a billion possibilities, countless specs of hope dotting the dark universe, newborn stars that is drawn to the person who sees beyond the present defeat, beyond the moment of being forced to bow one’s head down and accept the dead and loss of a futurist, earth’s mightiest defender and bravest man.

Steve sees it so suddenly, so clearly, the choice he _must_ make.

Going home to Peggy isn’t the answer.

It hasn’t been — not for a long, long while. Because Steve hasn’t lived in the past. 

He’s been living in the future.

“Thank you,” Steve whispers and turns around to look at the dark river, the what-if melting to I-will, as Strange’s lingering gaze disappears along with his footfall towards the mourning Stark household.

Steve has his 0.1 percent.

Steve knows what he must do.

 

FIN

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Prequel to a fix it I am kinda planning? Kinda? I am unsure. I haven't written in forever and this little word vomit is the first attempt in months ~~or maybe a year, I don't know anymore.~~ As the tags the suggests, this is Pre-Steve/Tony. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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